The Starry Messenger

If Hayden Planetarium teacher Mark Williams (Broderick) were a celestial object, he’d be a red dwarf. Such stars are relatively small, cool and dim, with low levels of nuclear fusion at the core. Mark also burns low, an amiable nebbish who apathetically complies with his wife (Smith-Cameron) as he halfheartedly starts an affair with a nurse-in-training single mother (Moreno). If you predict that the pressures of Mark’s home life and dead-end career will cause this passive-aggressive stargazer to go supernova, think again.

Because The Starry Messenger is a Kenneth Lonergan play (which he also directs with a uniformly excellent cast), his characters don’t follow the typical build-and-release emotional arc, nor does he mechanically twist his plot. Sure, there are moments of crisis and gentle revelation, and a tragic event takes place (offstage), but the genius of Lonergan’s approach is to achieve breathtakingly specific and genuine epiphanies through finely tuned dialogue that flows organically from each situation. He evinces a wry sympathy for his creations, balancing glimmers of kindness against a vaster expanse of gloomy resignation.

In the juxtaposition of cosmic inquiry with the mundane course of Mark’s infidelity and his attempt to crawl up one rung on the career ladder, Lonergan establishes ironic counterpoint. But he never flogs the metaphorical dimension of Mark’s field, nor does he provide any morals about the metaphysical issues raised, such as marital ethics, life after death and sin. Instead, like a good scientist, he observes and records. At last, Lonergan fans have a follow-up to 2001’s seriocomic hit Lobby Hero. Let’s just hope that we won’t have to wait for the next sighting of this sublime playwright as if he were a comet.—David Cote

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